Ordeal by Fire - Witnesses to the Great War

A chemical worker’s recollections of creating mustard
gas in a Leverkusen laboratory is followed by a
British army officer’s account of the devastating
effects of a gas attack; the unofficial Christmas truce
of 1914 – when German and British troops laid
down their guns, exchanging cigarettes and playing
football in No Man’s Land – is described with affection
from both sides; while in a letter to his parents,
a New Zealand infantryman reveals how Allied mismanagement
turned him and thousands like him
into cannon fodder on the slopes of Passchendaele.

Production Details

Bound in cloth

Set in Plantin with Zapf Chancery display

360 pages; 46 integrated black & white photographs

Printed endpapers

9½" x 6¼"

Extraordinary insight into the most
appalling of conflicts

The First World War inspired an enormous volume of
writing: letters home from the front, poetry, diaries,
newspaper despatches, intelligence reports, telegrams.
The lucid testimonies in this emotive eyewitness history,
selected by military historian Lyn Macdonald for
Folio, provide an extraordinary insight into the most
appalling of conflicts. Together they form an unofficial
history, describing the war as the combatants saw it.

No colour breaks this tongue of barren land
Save where a group of huddled tents gleams white;
Before me ugly shapes like spectres stand,
And wooden crosses cleave the waning light.
LIEUTENANT GEOFFREY DEARMER, ARMY SERVICE CORPS

Alongside Macdonald’s preface, this edition, back
by popular demand, features a new introduction by
British historian and documentary film producer
Richard van Emden. An expert on the First World
War, van Emden has interviewed 270 veterans and
written many books on the subject, including one
with Harry Patch, who was the last surviving veteran
of the trenches until his death in 2009. Van Emden
describes Macdonald as one of the first historians
to take an interest in the wartime experiences of
‘ordinary men and women’, her enthusiasm for their
stories helping to establish ‘a new style of historiography’.
This edition is illustrated with photographs
from the Imperial War Museum, selected for the
original Folio edition. Each provides a compelling
glimpse of life as a soldier, from the hardships of the
trenches and the omnipresence of death, to rarer
moments of humour and good cheer.

Jane Carmichael on bridging the gap

A hundred years on, the First World War has
moved beyond living memory; there are no
longer any veterans to provide direct evidence
of their experiences. Lyn Macdonald was able to
cull those memories while many were still alive. A
novel approach when first published; the passage of
time has given her work even greater importance. It is
in the true sense of the word a ‘testimony’ of the
Great War.

We expect to be relieved tonight but I don’t care if we are not for this isn’t a
bad ‘stunt’ and I must say I have enjoyed myself immensely. I was off duty at
6 p.m., and as the estaminets were open from six to eight everything was OK.
We cooked our own grub and lived like lords. Eggs and bacon for breakfast,
Welsh Rarebit and tea for supper, tinned fruit and cream for tea. But such
things ended on the twenty-eighth when we returned to the firing linePRIVATE J. BOWLES 2nd/16th BATTALION (QUEEN'S WESTMINISTER RIFLES), THE LONDON REGIMENT

The two main national memorials in Britain, the
Cenotaph in Whitehall and the Tomb of the Unknown
Warrior in Westminster Abbey, are characterised by
their deliberate emphasis on anonymity. Their aim was
to provide a focus for universal commemoration, and
at this they were entirely successful. However, they
also remind us that the First World War took place
in a society which was the antithesis of today’s cult of
the individual. The masses of participants were by and
large merely names in service records.

Lyn Macdonald penetrated something of their anonymity
with her collection of ‘voices’. She focused on the
most important theatre of war, the Western Front,
and was able to assemble compelling evidence of the
gamut of experience, especially in the ‘other ranks’
below the officer class. Now complemented by photographs,
many taken by the soldiers themselves, the
book becomes a bridge across the 100 intervening
years to enable us to listen to these voices in all
their different tones. It is a tremendous route
to understanding a very different era to
our own.

JANE CARMICHAEL
Director of Collections
National Museums Scotland

Four years of war, in the words of its soldiers

For those interested in the story of life in the front line, Ordeal
by Fire is a book that uses the voice of the soldier from many backgrounds
and nationalities, the Tommy, the Jerry, the Digger; the
men who frequented the trenches and who lived and endured the
daily grind and the intermittent moments of terror and exhilaration.
The book moves seamlessly through four years of war, from
mobilisation to embarkation and the opening salvos of the fighting
around Mons to the devastating battles with which the Great War
has become synonymous, the Somme, Arras and the Third Battle
of Ypres. We hear from the Old Contemptibles, that stalwart band
of regular soldiers, famously maligned by the Kaiser, but who
nevertheless held back the German onslaught despite overwhelming
odds, thereby thwarting the Kaiser’s best intention to seal an
early victory. And we hear too from German soldiers, eloquent
voices of the German Imperial Army, such as Leutnant Fritz
Nagel of the artillery, or Freiwilliger Reinhold Spengler of the 1st
Bavarian Infantry Regiment, who fought and suffered every bit as
much as their counterparts on the other side of No Man’s Land.
An extract from Richard van Emden's introduction